When you have the best time until.....
- Aug 4, 2025
- 8 min read
If you follow me on IG you could see we celebrated the 700K followers and it was a great celebration until the balloons were outside the house 😂
Seraphina decided that they are very scary and we started out a great session with the balloons to teach her that she can handle them and they are not so scary after all.
I was super impressed by how she changed her emotion during the session and how she agreed to finally come close to them and felt comfortable with them.
Environmental changes is one of the hardest things to handle for dogs with a sensitive nervous system (common in working lines border collies), so I have to teach her that just because the environment is changing it doesn’t mean she needs to be scared, and she can safely explore and see that with my help and hopefully without my help in the future.
The goal of course is not to make her friends with the balloons - but to make her understand that they just don’t matter and have no impact or power on her so there is no need to go into survival mode.
After we finished with that, I gave her a few minutes to calm her mind a bit more and started a “real” session to work on some commands and tricks; still needing to ignore the balloons.
The emphasis was more on staying in balanced mode of energy even though the environment of training is different and the balloons are still in the background.
After finishing with the food I took out a toy.
I know, that if I would have taken it before - she wouldn’t mind the balloons as much, but that’s not what I am looking for - I need her to notice something if I wan’t her to learn to accept and ignore it, or else, she will never learn to handle situations and how to remove stress for herself.
With the toy, the goal was same, keep a steady energy and don’t feel bad about the environment now that you understand what’s around you.
I used a lot of tugs to make her feel strong, and chasing when I felt that the stress was coming up again.
When I felt she has a nice energy I gave her the release signal and just stayed there to have some bonding time - as much as she would give me in her current state of mind.
This is still very hard for her because apparently I am not the most interesting “object” around and life is too short so you have to sniff all the interesting things around 😂
So I’ll take whatever attention she gives me at this point.
The next day I took her to this small park around our house where I could take her off leash safely and played with her in bigger field frame.
It wasn’t anything special but we enjoyed and it was fun for me to see that she can retrieve and focus on me in bigger distances too.
What I really love and hate about her is that she truly doesn’t care for me. She is not trying to do anything to make me happy - but it’s the other way around.
If she feels like she can’t or won’t do something - I can ask for sure, but she won’t do it unless I get creative, so thank you Fina for making me work 😅
And in the next session I really felt it.
I started with some follow ups and she was good but when I wanted to switch exercise to the rear legs target on platform we met a conflict.
I started from going forward and keeping the hind part on platform and then go down and placing back the hind legs.
At first repetition, no problem - not easy, but no problem and then…..
Conflict!!!!!!!
I tried changing my body position and placement but she made it clear that she doesn’t feel good about it so I had to be more creative, send outs back and forth, two more successes and DONE!
I will have to think more about how to do it, and maybe in this case - shaping would work better, so I’ll let her forget about it and try that soon 🙈
I wanted her mind to go elsewhere so took away the platform and worked on tricks instead; the bow trick is really nice for her to train and I feel she enjoys it more so I will probably use it with her as an action reward in the future but with this girl nothing is for sure, I will do what I will see on real time and as we all know, things change by the second so…….
After getting her happy with the bow I took out a toy and did some sequence to get her in the mood before asking her to really focus while working on ZEN. The rewards were mega big and with a lot of motion, and I even tried to combine actions with the toy in her mouth but this was hard on another level for her at this time so we finished with something easy and some social reward.
One of my followers asked me about joining her with Rhythm for a dance together and while I know it’s not the time for it, I tried doing a sequence of the two of them together.
It was neither easy or super successful and much more confusing for Rhythm and me than I thought it would be.
I felt like I have 2 tornados around me and at some point I actually got dizzy so after a few minutes I stopped and took my self to rest 😂
I know they won’t be doing it again soon but I am hopeful that in the future we will have a father and daughter due between the two of them.
Since I know that she is not the type of dog that wants to do everything I want to do, I sometimes take a day off from training to help her miss our time together a bit and most of the times I get her with fresh and interested energy which is nice for me.
So after a day off, I started out with a training of small full body platform workout. I want her to start thinking more about her steps so I asked her to spin and that was such a challenge, but eventually she was able to do it, and she even did it very good, but the failures did get her frustrated so I had to keep showing her that I am ok with her not being able to do everything perfectly on the first attempt.
Looking on the video I am wondering with my self if maybe I was pushing too much, but at the end of the day, I need her to learn how to go through frustration as well, so I am not sure if I handled it well or could have done something differently.
Anyways I decided to just stop and change to disc to remind her that I am also fun sometimes 😂😂😂
The next day was a really “SOCIAL” day.
We woke up and did a session with Martha to teach her to wait when another dog is working.
It’s a long video - but I really feel it’s worth the whole watching.
I started with the names game. I say a name and only the dog who is called in that name can get a treat.
Then, I tried to place each of them on a platform but that was a whole journey by itself.
When Martha was doing something - I was really trying to support Seraphina and help her keep the position on the platform.
And when it was Fina’s turn to do something I had to help her keep the concentration and not running to Martha (she is more fun than me I guess)
It was a slow session, but I really enjoyed it, because it was about something more simple and I could enjoy both dogs at same time and eventually I felt like they are both really enjoying it too!
It was super funny to see them both in the situation especially with Martha’s faces…. And the OVER Fina did above her at the end? OMG - best way to start my day !
After that session my student who is the owner of Fina’s grandpa came with her dog and we had a lesson, at the end of the lesson I took her out to enjoy some play time with another human and dog. Let’s just say, fun was had by everyone. Watching her communicating with such joy and confidence is something that makes me super happy both as owner and as her breeder.
The next visitor we had that day was Raider. A brother of Seraphina. He came with his owner and it was time for some craziness.
And although it was a challenge - we even managed to take a photo of the two pups together!
With one more day left before my flight out for a holiday without dogs, I had many plans and things I had to do.
So the first first thing we did was a basic nose touch session (no I am not giving up on this one, just taking it slow).
She is still moving a bit in it but I thought that a platform might be able to help.
So I placed hr on the platform and tried to go for nose touch with limited movement options and that improved her skill a lot but I could see she doesn’t appreciate me forcing her to stay still.
Since the difficulty of the exercise was higher now, it was also easier to “fall” to distractions and then something happened that I am not proud of.
I shouted at her for the first time 😔
As you saw, I am handling that she is reacting on the environment, but this is something that is very hard for me to tolerate. Not because I don’t like that she is scared or nervous but because I can’t have an aggressive dog with my lifestyle, and I know how quickly reacting can become aggression if you are not working on it.
When Seraphina was reacting to my neighbours child moving in his yard at this point I physically stopped her and didn’t allow her to even go near the situation, until she was more calm.
If she would have her leash on - I would be able to solve it better, but since she didn’t I did the first thing that I could to avoid a case where my dog will learn to go on to kids.
I then tried to continue the training and work on her focus but I felt very disappointed of my self and my energy changed completely.
Luckily for me, she didn’t hate me afterwards but I felt really off and wasn’t sure how to proceed from there; so I just did some positions and eye contact on the platform while rewarding her focus and ignoring the environment.
When I tried to do some tricks she got frustrated and left me there, so I went into more frustration. I had to catch my self really until we could get it back together but this was seriously not my best handling situation.
I hope to never do that again to her because it was just not fair.
That being said,
I can’t show only the good stuff - because this is not what this blog is about.
Raising a puppy is a struggle and here is my place to share also the ugly parts so that when you read this, you can feel that you are not alone.
And that it’s ok to make mistakes - as long as you want to fix them afterwards.
After that I took her to sleep and she slept until afternoon when we had a vet appointment.
At the vet we had to take out blood sample for her rabies anti blood test so that she can fly with me in the future and she behaved like a queen.
On the way out of the vet I decided to take the time and play with her before I would leave for my flight.
I felt that we both needed it after the morning we had if we want to be bonding again and I am so happy I did that, because she was amazing 😍